This invention relates to the provision of means for and a method of reducing heat losses when handling hot material. It is particularly concerned with such means and methods of reducing heat loss from material continuous casting plant and in hot-rolling mills, e.g. from metal slabs and sections, but is applicable to other installations and not only in metal processing industries.
The use of heat-reflecting panels to reduce heat loss is known, but such panels have limitations, particularly in their use as upper and side boundaries of an enclosure. It is known that the efficiency of heat insulation falls as the space between the hot material and the enclosure walls increases, but in most practical applications a rolling mill is required to deal with a large range of sizes of material so that there is an inevitable loss of efficiency when handling sections smaller than the largest for which the installation is designed.
Efficient heat-insulating panels, such as are described in GB 1 603 428, are relatively fragile and protective measures need to be taken if they are to be disposed close to the path of the material in a hot rolling mill. The additional cost and complication of these measures are only justified by the fact that damage to the hot faces of the panels can result in considerable financial loss having regard to the operating costs of modern hot-rolling mills.
The known panels have been used to form tunnel-like enclosures along the material path through the rolling mill, the heat losses at the ends of the tunnel being unimportant if the path is occupied by moving material for most of the time. They would be less effective if they were to be used to limit heat losses from a static slab or billet near one or both ends of the enclosure, when losses through those ends will be significant.